This specification relates to power/thermal characterization and power monitoring for subcircuits of real-time hardware systems and simulated systems.
Simulation of large circuits for smart power management has seen some improvements through application specific designs. However, power and temperature limits were reached over a decade ago. Worsening integrated circuit (IC) yield problems are affected by power, where parts of the chip may overheat.
Despite advances in IC manufacturing and computer architecture, the performance of digital systems has plateaued over several generations of technologies. This behavior is attributed to overheating caused by excessive on-chip power dissipation. The overheating is mainly due to inability of cooling systems to cope with demands of increased logic density in modern day digital systems.